Musings Coming Out of the Mind of Robert Milliman robertmilliman.com – bobmilliman.com

“Do Mennonites Really Know How to Have Fun?”

My friend and brother, John Wagenaar, occasionally distributes a memo to his other siblings in the Southside Mennonite Church family in Springfield, Ohio. As a fellow gadfly, I look forward to reading John’s wise reflections. One of those memos, Memo 20, surfaced out of the rubble in our house during a recent attempt at conforming to American, domestic orderliness. “Would others benefit from John’s trenchant remarks?” I thought. Believing you will, I reprint them here. [BTW, my additions are in brackets]

I’m not much on sports but, boy, you just have to love those Dutch!—going all the way to the top in the world soccer cup. The Spanish beat the Germans, though that would have been an intense contest between the Dutch and Germans, fraught with historic intimations and possible civil consequences (I once saw a bumper sticker in Yellow Springs: “IF YOU’RE NOT DUTCH, YOU’RE NOT MUCH.” Turned out she wasn’t Dutch at all, but had spent time in Nederland). Anyways, the Spanish don’t stand a chance against the mighty Dutch. The game is today, during our business meeting! Can we adjourn? [PS: Netherlands 0, Spain 1 in extra time]

While I’m at it, I’d like to put in a good word for wine and sex—both of which seem to have fallen in disrepute in recent weeks in our church (The wine meditation seems a little hokey: “relevance” stuff we’ve come to expect from the salaried Mennonite curriculum committee, and is the reason I fear “themed Sundays). Mennonites have this guilt and shame thing (cf. “Being Mennonite,” The Mennonite, July 2010, 26): An intrusion of American temperance mentality and Methodist revivalism upon a basically European Mennonite consciousness?

Do Mennonites really know how to have fun? On the subtle pleasure of sex, read Song of Solomon. On wine, consider that this was Jesus’ daily beverage and avenue to festivity: “Wine lifts the spirit and gladdens the heart.” He certainly knew how to keep a good party going: “Why did you save the good stuff for last?”

Paul’s health advice to Timothy—“a little wine is good for the stomach”—has been confirmed by contemporary health research. The French, who know how to have fun (le joi le vie), eat all sorts of delicious high-fat foods—pork, eggs, cream, butter, pâté, mayo, you name it, all condemned by the American health establishment—with wine at all their meals. The Americans still haven’t been able to figure out why the French, on such a supposedly dastardly regime, are so much healthier than the Americans (meaning they don’t see near the heart disease and cancer rates), who have been languishing on the low-fat, low-pleasure philosophy over the past 30 years. So, American health researchers call this “the French paradox.” There is a puritanical side to all this: All the taste is in the fat; if you have no fat, you have no taste. Yet, Americans have been willing to forego taste for the sake of health, which, ironically, they lost in the process. It turns out that the low-fat diet is unhealthy. Maybe you haven’t heard (cf. In Defense of Food, by Michael Polin). [See Stanton Peele, “A Toast to Your Health,” The Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2010]

If we’re going to pick on any beverage, it should be coke. How many of us are fooled by this deadly drink? Even tobacco appears benign in comparison to the far-ranging, worldwide, immense, adverse health consequences of using coke daily as a recreational beverage.

Bottom line: Let’s not get carried away with our moral arrogance. Even tobacco has its place as the Native Americans understood, in a sacred context of peace-making, echoing Old Testament accents on incense and smoke being “pleasing unto the Lord.” Of course, the Bible didn’t know about coke and sugar and transfats, but these, truth be told, are the deadly killers.

Finally, Everett Thomas, in his July editorial in The Mennonite transforms “the Arizona question” from a moral issue into a political one of seeking compromise through mutual discussion. Anyone recall the Germans candidly discussing “the Jewish Question” (“de Joodse vragen”)—what do we do with these people (No one seems to be discussing the hellish place Arabs occupy in this country)? To his credit, Thomas acknowledges that the immigrant voice should be decisive for the church: There is nothing to discuss in the face of unambiguous prejudice and injustice.